taking sides: Livejournal v ILXor

I dunno, on LJ there's this whole should I feel bad about reading this? do I know this person well enough to intrude like this? thing going on. Well, for me, probably not you.

Hey, maybe we should get LiveJournal to sponsor Poptimism during the wilderness months!

I have a live journal, somewhere, I can't recall under what name. So add me, yay!

The threading-after-50-posts and the lack of revivability is annoying on LJ, but on the other hand it allows you to exhaust a topic, collapse the conversation neatly into a closet, and move on. After all, is yesterday revivable in real life?

Very true, both in searching it out and being offered.

hmm, yes, but that very action of "friending" people sounds to me like a) a hassle and b) a way of ensuring that your interactions are always kept within a given group. i know fuck all about LJ and don't want to, but what i love about ILX is that you can stumble upon it, jump right in and start talking to/arguing with everybody else. you don't have to seek people out: they're just there.

I like that I can build a signature and a community

i like the fact that ILX is a community far, far bigger and more sprawling than any "builder" could have ever imagined. its lack of boundaries is perhaps its biggest draw.

Right there in that "talk to/argue with" construction you reveal yourself as someone who hasn't experienced the tone of LJ. LJ is supportive in tone, most of the comments you'll get will be kind and enthusiastic. ILX is cynical, corrosive, negative. In terms of my own personal experience, I've found that ILX is like boarding school (the time I discovered "the dark heart of man") and LJ is more like my life after boarding school (the time I was lauded for revealing "the dark heart of man"). That's not to say that corrosive cynicism and plain-talking isn't good from time to time — sometimes I pick fights with people on LJ just to get away from the cloying supportiveness of it all. But I've never stayed up all night fighting an argument on LJ, as I remember doing (years ago) on ILX.

Kates "private things in public" slant is weird to me. LJ on the whole is way more protected. Not only can you lock posts to a select group of people, you can tag your LJ unindexable. Mine's never appeared in search engines. ILX frequently does however. I am baffled by the idea anyone would think ILX is in any way private, let alone more so than LJ!

how do you do this?

i don't know the lj people at poptimism either, they're all goths!

Marcello next time the blogging urge strikes you should try it on LJ and feel the difference!

Its also worth mentioning that "friending" is a bit of a misnomer - people take it personally but all it really implies is "this is a user who I'd like to read regularly" (kind of like an RSS feed I suppose). It also allows that person to see any posts you lock to "friends only". But even then you can post private posts too. Its all passworded.

I know many people who do just that. They have one public post that says "this journal is friends only", in case someone stumbles on the blog. Every other post is filtered.

I filter work posts, drug ones, etc.

Same goes for posting on ILX of course.

"Usual sort of thing" Anger and recrimination all round.

also maybe you want friends to be able to find out how you are doing if you want to you don't want strangers to know, and you don't want to impose upon other people by emailing them maybe it's just a tone thing. when you email people it's normally something more significant. like how phonecalls are more significant than text messages and you won't call someone just to say "lol i just saw a roadsign that says 'wetwang' on it, bye!" because sometimes life is more than just a one minute phonecall.
-- ken c (pykachu10...), October 13th, 2005 12:09 PM. (ken c) (later) (link)

same problem with handwritten letters.

you put it on livejournal you can change it afterward and possibly before the other person sees it. can't with email
-- ken c (pykachu10...), October 13th, 2005 12:05 PM. (ken c) (later) (link)

SAME PROBLEM WITH ILX TOO, YOU SEE.

yeah but w/ilx0r, you can hot-link to "funny" pictures, can't you? Glitter and stuff is jst, like, yesterday.

Who doesn't love a little bit of glitter tossed around hither and thither though?

goths are kind of fat
― terry lennox. (gareth)

^^^settin' ilx trends

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C-6x8bHWAAEvu9_.jpg

Well, I am old.